Paraphernalia
by Threesmallcrows
Summary: If any of them thinks of him (and he has no reason to suspect that a single one of them does, that anyone remembers him at all), they probably assume it starts with the sword. The story of his things; the story of him.


**Mirror**

If any of them thinks of him (and he has no reason to suspect that a single one of them does, that anyone remembers him at all), they probably assume it starts with the sword.

The truth is that the sword and the mirror came together, and the mirror first in the pair. It was with the mirror that he caught his first sight of ashen skin and flaxen hair, golden symbols writhing like serpents and a smile cruel as driving rain. He looked into the mirror and saw himself human for the last time. A snatched glimpse—before the other dove through the portals of his eyes and poured into him, clawed in like an animal settling into a burrow of skin.

How he regrets that day. Even after all these centuries, how keenly he finds himself still able to regret.

**Sword**

He does not even want to touch it.

I cannot use it, he argues. I don't know how.

_Then you must learn._

I am not a warrior. I am—was a countryside doctor.

_Do you think the mononoke care for your quibbles?_

I have told you that I have no quarrel with them. I am just a human. Let someone else fight them. You can do it.

_I am you, and you are me. I must wield it, and therefore so must you._

No. I cannot. I will not.

_You refuse?_

I refuse.

_Fine, then. I deign not to force you. The people will die, and another corner of the land break off into smoky darkness. Eventually all will return to the night-chaos, when the land floated like oil and Japan was brine yet to drip from the Heavenly spear. All will return to nothing._

Let it.

He thinks himself strong. That he can stomach the storm to come. The screams go on for three days and nights. He tries to sleep, but fails.

The other forces him to walk to the village once the _mononoke _has completed its meal. Looking around, he kneels in the dust and throws up until his teeth feel like they are coming loose, until he feels the loops of his guts coming up his throat, rising like feelings of vengeance. The other looks down on him with cold eyes, pries his jaws open as he writhes on the ground, and languidly feeds him, one by one, their names, their stories, their hopes and dreams.

It is the children who go down hardest.

Not a one of them deserved what they were served.

When it is finally, finally, over, he lies wasted on the ground. The other is a deeper blackness against the night, a void above devoid of stars.

_Do you see, now?_

He does, but the other puts words to it anyway.

_You must wield it, or suffer the consequences._

First, he hunts down the red velvet case for it. No other will he accept. It takes years. He has time. Along the long road, he practices. _Akateko, buruburu, chochinbi. _He relearns his alphabet like a toddler. _Hyosube, inugami, jinmenju. _The sound of hysterical humans spewing their lies becomes so familiar it is its own sort of perverse comfort. He drags the truth from them like a rotten tooth from a mouth, before he learns to coax, to tease it out like knots from hair, the strand-like intricacies, the lengthy tales trailing all over the floor. The rule of three shapes his days like a potter's hands clay.

For the first scores of years the loneliness breaks him over and over. He cannot stand it, yet stand he does. Every day he does not stand, a _mononoke _goes free. Every time he lies prostrate on the floor, weeping at the burden of the knowledge he must bear, humans die.

He stands. He fights. He does not question why. He was once one of these he now protects. That, at least, is its own brand of allegiance.

A century passes of numbness. Slowly, he improves. He treads the shadow ways with his eyes open, expanding the map in his mind. His smile grows sharp, his patience large, his voice soft and dangerous as a dagger hidden in a sleeve. In his two-hundred-and-eighth year, he takes down a _bake-neko _that's the size of a farmhouse and the age of an ancient pine tree, and the other smiles upon him, stroking his hair.

_Good child._

He tries not let his heart rise in joy at the praise. He isn't a child anymore, so why should he be made to feel like one still?

Keenly, he is aware that he walks a road not a single soul in this world can understand. It is his path and his alone. Often this is frightening, overwhelmingly so, but sometimes, he catches himself finding it a little—liberating. A little exciting.

It is not until the year the humans number 1969 that he finds the words to describe this feeling.

Summer of that year, he watches, just behind and a little apart from the rest of the world, as several humans take their first steps onto the moon.

That, he decides, is precisely the feeling of grand, frightening, exhilarating loneliness that he knows, and for some decades afterwards, whenever he thinks of the weightless touch of spacesuit-covered-foot to dusty grey ground, he feels as heavy and satisfied as a man after a good meal.

**O-fuda**

Nights, he sits by a fire, squinting down at the paper until his neck hurts.

He's doing it all wrong. The other's ill-contained laughter tells him as much; his smiles like licks of the tongue against the nape of their neck. He is borrowing, mainly, from pieces of old Shinto literature, but the words are cliché, childish, and powerless. The sloppy ink of his brushwork reduces the paper into sludgy messes.

_You insult me, child. Writing the names of these so-called gods in my presence._

Then should I invoke yours? You do not even have one, demon.

_You are not filling out an order for a shipment of goods. Copying mindlessly will bring you nowhere._

These are how the humans have warded evil for centuries.

_And look at how well they've done._

The other is right, of course. The ink sits there, stagnant and doe-eyed, as the _mononoke _tears him apart. The other laughs at him in his helpless pain.

_A good pot of salt would have done you better. Ah, child. In time, you will be wiser._

He blacks out, awakes, and begins again. Moon after moon, the seasons turning creakingly past like the cogs of a great wheel. He goes nowhere. The other tortures him, keeps him awake for weeks at a time, grinds the million darkly-unknown patterns of the world into his bones until he cries with the pain of a knowledge not meant to be contained by man.

_You will learn. You will learn._

An order and a prophecy. But does it have to hurt so much? Apparently, yes. For twelve hours at a time he cannot breathe, choking and rigid as the other reaches easily down his throat and rearranges his nerves and his sclera from within.

_There. Now you can see properly; now you are a touch less blind._

"I hate you," he murmurs, watching the color of the sound of his voice float by. The root of every tooth in his mouth aches with the aftershocks of shattering; he half-expects one to come loose when he prods around with his tongue.

For a time every angry spirit he comes across tears him apart as he struggles with one or the other of the three requirements. Flailing, failing, faltering with his questions and tripping over his words. The other whips him mercilessly upwards and onwards from these failures. In between battles he is made to count the individual rise and fall of the ridges of a ripple, or flawlessly predict the shift of a cloud of gnats. At night the other holds him down and crams shadow into his mouth and presses his hand over his lips until he has to swallow so he can breathe.

"I am trying," he grits out, lying on the ground as the shadows flex and swim in his gut.

_No. You are resisting_, the other says in an indulgent voice.

That is another one of the nights he tries to scratch him out of his skin, turning madly on himself like a rabied animal. He goes to sleep bloody, wakes healed.

_Have you had enough? I am not so easily gotten rid of._

I hate you.

_Rise._ _There is something that needs to be done._

He knows. He senses it, now—the other has ensured every misbalance irritates him like a rash, a headache, a brand held between his shoulder blades until he screams. A woman a few miles from here has murdered all of her children, and sits, alone, blood-covered, in her house.

_Get up._

He grits his teeth, and takes the block of ink to the inkstone. It's still not enough. Something more, something—

Ah.

He opens the tip of his finger on his own canine, and squeezes it over the ink like an orange.

Inside him, the other chuckles.

_You are learning._

"No thanks to you."

This next batch holds a little better, lasts a little longer before shrieking into ash. Still not good enough; he finishes the fight wounded and exhausted.

I should make the next set now, he thinks, wry, pressing the wet threads of his obi against his torn stomach. The supplies lie ready.

_Adding more blood will not help._

If I have to be thus injured every time I want advice, I will be dead before we ever master the writings of these things.

_We? You presume. It is you who is yet artless._

With such a master, can I be anything but.

_You speak without the air of a question._

It is either the best or the worst part when the other is inexplicably pleased with him and rewards him, unwarranted. Attacks of heat low in his stomach, swooping like swallows between his thighs, until he kneels, trembling, and bares his throat. He was a man, after all, and remains in some part one. And, he thinks, it is better, probably, that humans only know the outward touch of others. The feeling of being grasped, felt, _taken _from within, the fingerprints of a voice pattering down his spine, is a sensation centimeters from madness. If he was not as he is, he is not certain he could stand it—the golden heat, damaging as sun, forging him, burning him to pieces.

Now is such a moment, and he is too weak to try and (futile, always futile) fight it off. So he lies there and takes it. It's a touch less foreign, this time—less invasive.

"Such a… lustful creature," he gasps.

_A lustful demon for a lustful man._

"There is no human left that I can claim."

_No matter. You are claimed by me._

He remains silent, but he thinks that he is not quite ready to agree with that, yet.

It is a tranquil, lazy summer day when he discovers it. There is a cricket perched on his bare leg and drying spring grass warm as a woman against his back. He plucks a cattail from the river's bank and, half-awake, draws the first thing that comes to mind. Two sweeping arcs and an oval in the middle. Even he does not realize what it looks like until the other stirs, _purring_ in his mind.

_An eye._

"An eye," he repeats. Now that it is said, he cannot unsee it.

The other heaves a great sigh like a piece of fog. _At last._

The next time he is in town he buys four skeins of brightly colored thread. He spends the last of the summer days in the far north, among the Ainu people, sewing the swooping patterns of the local women weavers into the back of his _haori. _

_You'll make the flowers jealous with those colors._

"Perhaps that is my aim."

He patterns it along his sleeves and his back and paints it in gold on his trunk, traces the shape lovingly on all his seals, arranging the warding words around its pleasing symmetry. And the next _mononoke _runs shrieking to a halt when confronted with that eye, morphing warningly red.

All that blood, at least, seemed to have had an effect.

**Scales**

The _tenbin _were, originally, a cloud of butterflies, the remnant shadows of a cloud of _mononoke. _He does not quite know what to do about them—this is unprecedented. Hesitantly, he takes a step away from the carnage. The butterflies follow.

On the third day they freeze sometime at night and he awakes to a hail of metallic clatters as they fall to the ground. He picks one of their bodies up; the scale jumps upright on its point, bells jingling merrily.

"A mystery you care to explain?"

The other is silent. He smiles. "So there are things that even you do not understand."

_Be careful they do not lead you astray._

"They will aid me. I have freed them, after all."

_Do not assign your human equivalencies to the mononoke._

Feeling almost gleeful, he ignores the other and gathers them up, stowing them in the middle drawer of his peddler's trunk. Their bells dance a merry rhythm as he walks.

The next _mononoke _is a large one, slow to move and dangerous when awoken. He has plenty of time to prepare. When he lays out a scale out of curiosity, it drops its bells of its own accord; the rest eagerly nose their way out of their drawer, a litter of tiny metallic pups. Ten seconds before the _mononoke _attacks him, a line of them inclines gracefully to the side like a troupe of dancers, warning him of the incoming direction. He turns towards the shadow and meets it in a cascade of firework blade.

"Lead me astray, did you say?"

The other remains silent.

"Rather, I believe they are somewhat fond of me."

The scale on his fingertip nods slightly in agreement.

**Necklace**

Almost always it is a human concern he meddles with. But he has mediated conflicts between mountains, soothed the souls of ghosts.

When the voice calls out to him, he thinks instantly of her. He turns sharply, his _geta _clicking eagerly against the stone of the narrow mountain path, like the calls of little birds. It has been some time since her last appearance.

But there is no one there.

"_Kusuriuri." _Her voice is plaintive beneath its usual cheeriness, loud and distinctly not a misheard twist of the wind. "Can you hear me?"

"I hear you," he murmurs, and touches the obsidian stone face of the mountain lightly. If he closes his eyes and concentrates, he can just make out the edges of binding ink, lurking malevolent as venomous spiders beneath his fingertips. "You are…"

She tells him of a territorial dispute among _yokai_, a lengthy struggle over the sooty souls of the tiny sooty village huddled at the mountain's foot. He only half-listens: the tale is moot; he's already decided to aid her, even if she is not, in fact, the Kayo he has known so many times. "So, anyway, I've been stuck in here since _June_," she wails. "I'm bored out of my head."

"No doubt."

Apparently he hasn't quite managed to keep the amusement out of his voice, because she scolds, "Don't you dare laugh at me! You think this is funny? You try being stuck inside a rock—literallya, an actual, like, _boulder_! With _insects _crawling all over you! Some guy even took a piss on my foot!"

"So you can still feel, stuck inside there?"

"I certainly can, and as to that, would you mind not putting your hands all over the place, thanks very much?"

He takes his sweet time removing his hand from the rock. Not that she'd know, but in her last life, they'd become rather…entangled.

There is really no need to make camp right there, on that scraggly pin-thin path with its sheer ledge plummeting into the stormy ocean—after all, she will certainly be there tomorrow, and the day after that—but he does so anyway.

_You won't be able to strike a fire, not exposed to the wind like this._

"Oh, stop grumbling," he smiles, even as he gives up on the flint.

"What?" comes Kayo's disembodied voice.

"Never mind."

Although he has encountered many (and many, and _many_) of the same faces, they have always been pitiably, beautifully human. This is the first time he's meet a Kayo that's not—and probably the last; he suspects that this is an anomaly, one that the order of the world will no doubt soon move to correct.

It seems that even in her spirithood she does not remember him. Patiently he listens to her story, the same story, really, that she has always told: the early marriage, the cruel husband, the escape and the struggle, the loss of one or the other of her babes—this time her own death, too, in the war that took all four of her children. He guesses that she is a _mu-onna_, a void woman forever emptied by the death of her offspring, jealously guarding the (living) children of the sooty village.

When she has fallen silent—asleep, he suspects, in the cold embrace of her elemental prison, the other prickles in irritation at him.

_What do you linger here for?_

He bows his head slightly, his jewelry tinkling in the clawing wind, sparks of ringing-gold noise like embers. "I am doing what you have taught me to do. There is a girl with a dilemma, and I aim to solve it."

_Don't mock me. Neither she nor the spirit she quarrels with is malevolent towards the village. There is no reason for you to be here._

"I wish to be here. That is my reason."

_And what of _our _reason? What of the work that needs to be done?_

"When the game is played over centuries, you cannot pretend to me that a day or two—"

The other roars in his head like a forest fire, crackling and dark. _A day makes the life of a mayfly—_

His own voice is icy water poured over coals. "Then it is fortunate that I do not deal in the fates of insects."

Somewhere in the bowels of his case, a single _tenbin _shifts on its side, bells ringing in laughter. His resolve strengthens. He lies down on his side, pressing his back carefully against the mountain face—against Kayo's feet, her ankles and her warm, strong, farmdaughter calves. "You can no longer force me to leave," he murmurs, gathering his sleeves about himself. "It was you that taught me that strength."

_You insolent fool. _An ache gathers in his knees—but nothing more, a mere suggestion, a hint. _Nothing will come of this. You cannot make love to a spirit, and you cannot keep her. How many times do you have to lose her to understand that?_

He sighs sweetly in memory of her brown arms, flushed deep-plum-blossom in firelight. In that life she was already a woman, no longer a girl. If he does well in the coming days, he may yet release those arms from their imprisonment. He may yet earn the right to lose her again, as he loses all his humans.

"No," he agrees. "You have not yet taught me that understanding. And thank the gods for that."

Freeing her does not take a day, nor two, nor even a week. The language binding her is old and hard and difficult to break, and in the end he cannot accomplish it without attracting the wrath of the spirit that bound her in the first place.

It comes raging up the road as he flings aside the last words, stripping vermillion ink from the mountain with his nails. It is an airborne wave—that buzzes. The boulders quiver with the terrible weight of billions of locusts.

_It is fortunate, is it not, that you do not deal in the fates of insects? _laughs the other.

Tensed, he reaches for the sword—but of course he cannot draw it; the only humans within a hundred miles of them are at the bottom of this accursed heap of rock, sound asleep as the night rages above them.

Be silent or be helpful.

_Never command me._

Are you really so small? he thinks as the mouth of the storm of insects reaches him, as it opens its maw to swallow him whole—

Elbows, clubbing him in the back.

"Get down!" she shrieks, and a brilliant, brilliant light follows.

Her gold is a very different one from his—a white-gold the color of spring flowers, of the blended parts of the inside of an egg. A good color for a mother, he thinks, indomitable as dawn.

The insects, when they reach her outhrown field, turn simply into snow.

Crouched at her glowing feet, he keeps his eyes clamped shut, and even then the light is searing, a stabbing sharp sensation behind his ears and through his temple, and the other is laughing at him, mocking him, and _you should have listened to me, child, should have left her in that rock where you found her—_

"Never," he grits out. Opening his mouth is a mistake; in a second it is full of snow, freezing and thick.

The other _yokai _is a powerful one. Little by little, he can feel Kayo being worn down.

Run away, he thinks—pleads. Leave me here.

"Are you kidding me? How could I?" she shouts, even as her gold flakes, piece by piece.

He spits snow.

Thank you. Thank you, Kayo.

It is a close thing. They wear one another down at nearly the exact same moment. As a matter of fact, the last dozens of insects land intact in the snowy remains of their brethren, twitching and climbing confusedly around him.

Abruptly, she sags into his arms—and now he can see what he'd known all along, that it is Kayo, the same clear eyes and generous mouth, but worn, now, slack with exhaustion, and her dark hair is the white of the dead, and her form weighs less than a feather.

He brushes pale strands out of her grey face, and kisses her brow. "Kayo?"

She stirs weakly. "…I never told you. How'd you…?"

"I have always known you."

"What… the hell… does that mean?"

He chuckles. Already the tips of her fingers are beginning to fade into nothing.

"Annoying… You're always so…"

So he holds her wrist, instead, and then her shoulder, and then her face.

"Until next time," he whispers.

Her smile is the last thing to go. In the end, the only thing that remains is the snow, the insects, and him—as well as a long strand of amber beads, of the sort used by Buddhists to count their mantras. He hadn't even had time to notice she was wearing them.

_You were right._

He fingers one absently, running his thumb over the bead's glassy surface. "Hm?"

_She was an anomaly, and the world moves to correct its anomalies._

"You're trying to say it moved through my hand?" He rises, looping the strand over his own neck—and stone cannot carry a scent, nor warmth, yet it seems to him that these ones do. "That I made my own downfall? There is no need to be so smug. I am, as always, in the wrong. I will not apologize for it."

The other snorts. _Arrogant from start to finish. Looking forward to seeing her again?_

"Of course." As he knows he will.

He picks up his pack and begins the slow, trudging path away from the sooty, still-sleeping village. There are still some hours until dawn. It has begun to snow. He doesn't mind.

**Rings**

Those coiled in his hair and around his fingers are made of the same material, heavy, cool jade marbled like fine meat.

He looks at himself in the mirror of an eddy in the river, for a while.

_You are vain, aren't you._

"They are useful," he says softly. To him they smell faintly of the still bowels of the earth were they were born, old even to one like him. Stalwart against evil in the way all true nature is—the turn of a river, a newly sprouted clover leaf, the particular shape of a cloud, sea salt in the air. He was genuinely surprised when the monks pressed them on him. For all their similarities, those of religious orders have as a whole not been overly sympathetic to him over the years. His brand of god is perhaps a little too unstructured for their comfort.

The other laughs at his thoughts, buzzing around the inside of his head like a wasp trapped in a room.

_You mean me? Ah, but the blame is shared. Buddha himself would weep in horror over your ostentatious silks._

"You have never found my attire problematic before."

_Did I say I found them problematic? They suit you._

"My, my." He smiles faintly. "Compliments? I should be frightened. Your mood is unusually good today."

_It's your mood that is good, child. And just from a silly ring on your finger. _

He shrugs, feeling the other's hands resting on the inside of his shoulders.

"I like the way they look."

_I know you do. Dressed like a court jester, and still the women flock to you. Humans are such foolish creatures._

"And how would you prefer I dress?"

_I prefer you dressed in skin, the way I first found you._

"Ah, but then I would not be dressed at all. We humans call that being naked."

_Naked? _the other chuckles. _I have sifted through your dreams and read every one of your thoughts. What layer of woven stuff could clothe you, then?_

**Studs**

Truth be told, the little vermillion jewels in his ears have no significance whatsoever. They are almost certainly not real garnet, although they are advertised as such. Simply: he saw them in an Edo shop window, desired them suddenly, bought them with what money he had. That night he ran a needle back and forth through a lantern flame a good dozen times; the pain was sharp and small, like the cry of a lone crane at dawn. This cheap jewelry is the only truly human goods he owns, unmarred by the touch of anything supernatural save perhaps his own skin. The flash of enjoyment that pierces him when he catches sight of himself in a mirror or a stream, the pale pink of his earlobe set off brilliantly by the deep-red stone, is an unguardedly human emotion. The other mocks him from within, but does nothing to stop it. So it should be.

**Stigmata**

The markings are the most obvious of them, but it's more—the odd shape of his ears, the quirk of canines against his lower lip, the untameable paleness of his eyes and skin. A subhuman morphology.

When he was newly born, he'd been horrified. Just as the sun darkened the farmers' arms, so the moon had bleached him night after night as he hid, helpless, in the dark, teeth lengthening, ears pricking back into foxes', nails gone hard and sharp and long and the color of the meat of the taro root. He broke into a monster, and hated himself for it.

Why? Why me?

_Because the mononoke exist, and so, I, also. _

So? Let them exist! I just wanted to live. They are no concern of mine.

_You ask for right without left, mind without matter, light without shadow. There are certain things that are linked in this world. It is an affair of balance. You will come to see that._

I'm just a human. Leave me alone.

_You were. You are, no longer._

In his fifth century with the other, he becomes involved temporarily with a young geisha. They enjoy one another in the hours surrounding dawn, after she has returned from her parties and engagements and professional flirtations. She acts as if he is a stage actor from the theater down the street; he knows that at heart she does not wish to understand who or what he is, and this is all right by him. One evening, as he waits bored in her room, he unscrews the lid of her makeup pot. He paints himself over, working white powdery paste over his eyes. The markings are bright and hard to conceal. When he's finished, he kneels before her mirror and observes himself. In the end, it is the face of a man that looks strange on him. He has, he realizes, become—accustomed. He wipes away the makeup with the back of his hand. The markings return eagerly, like puppies to their master.

The times he finds himself in now, there are, strangely enough, others who mark their faces in ways like his. Women, most often, but sometimes men—or half-creatures hovering between the sexes, looking oddly like himself with their dangling hair and jewelry and confrontational eyes. It is a strange era, of discontent and rotting, infected longing.

He cannot stir himself to care, much. His curiosity has blunted over time. He doesn't quite feel tired, but it has been a very, very long way since he was human. The demons that are left are larger, now, strongholds of ill intent like fortresses, and they have been watching him approach, plotting. He kills them, one by one, and the task is not easy. They leave a bad taste in his mouth, like the oddly metallic water of the cities. He longs for the pure spring water of his youth.

The end, when it comes, arrives swiftly and without the slightest warning. He has been torn apart so many times that this instance is a tired iteration on a familiar theme. As before, he lies down and waits for the pain to subside.

It does not, and it is only when, groaning, he catches a glimpse of his naked face in his mirror that he begins to realize what is happening.

His eyes seem small and soft without the cruel red. His mouth, at last, allowed not to quirk in perpetual smile, curled in an ugly grimace.

Is this…? he asks, softly, and the other does not say anything, just nods.

He chuckles a little. Blood in his teeth and his mouth and he spits. Couldn't you have made it less painful?

_I did not decide this. _And could it be—that the other actually sounds pained? _I—would not have it this way._

But this is the way of things.

_Evidently._

I see it's time for yet another journey.

_It will be easier, I think. A swift road._

And a happy ending?

_Are you tired? Do you wish to sleep?_

Yes.

_Then you have nothing to fear._

Have you chosen the next?

_Of course. It is the way of things. You may see her, if you wish. Just open your eyes. She watches over you even now. She tries to keep you from death._

Kind of her, but useless.

_She does not understand._

Of course. But she will.

_Goodbye, child._

Fare well.

He drifts, then, and does not expect to wake to the light of this earth again. But he comes awake once more. He does not have to look to know the time; dawn thrums in his veins like a mother's crooned lullaby.

Ah, that's right. He had a mother, once, and a father. He shed their faces centuries ago. Human was he born, and so, it seems, shall he depart.

He does manage, then, to open his eyes. He is very weak and the world appears blurred as if through a misted window. The girl, as she is, is to him but a crown of short-cropped hair and concerned eyes. She is so human that it nearly draws tears from him.

He wants to tell her, warn her. But he doesn't have many words left to him. And really, even with all these decades pulling him up like puppet strings, how could he describe the form of the other? What poetry could convey his truth?

And the regret—

He regrets for her, that she is chosen. He regrets that there has to be a next, even as he accepts, fundamentally, that this is the way of things.

She is saying something to him, some futile attempt at tethering him to the earth.

With the last scraps of air left to him, he sighs:

"Ah—child…"

Enough.

He sleeps.


End file.
